Olympic Games: The hammer could be first to be thrown out

Michael Johnson and Daley Thompson dined with a group of journalists this week to publicise their commitment to the Laureus Sport for Good programme, and over cheese and drinks – white wine in Johnson's case, water in Thompson's – the conversation turned, light-heartedly, to the unwieldy nature of what Johnson's compatriots term track and field.

No other sport that I can call to mind contains such a disparate set of activities. Athletics is sprinting, is middle distance running, is long-distance running, is hurdling, is steeple-chasing, is long and triple and high jumping, is shot putting, is hammer and javelin throwing, is race walking, is pole vaulting...

Put together, the range tests almost every imaginable physical sporting capacity. They call that joined-up event the decathlon, of course, which is why Thompson, twice Olympic champion of the 10-part discipline, could claim to be the better pure athlete of the two at the table.

The notion that the International Olympic Committee might target athletics as it sought to cut down the size of its quadrennial Games was taken up good-naturedly by the Quiet American, who, two years into retirement, holds the world 200 metres and 400m records now and for the foreseeable future.

While he was still competing, Johnson once admitted at a press conference that he hadn't watched a 10,000m all through. No great surprise, then, that the events he believed most worthy of retention were the 1500m and under.

Asked what discipline would have to go first, Johnson replied with a broad grin: "Hammer throwing''.

It does have to be said that hammer throwing can tend to the comic. One thinks of the Irish thrower who once managed to demolish the cage. There is something cartoon-like about hulking men winding themselves up into a frenzy and producing nothing but an embarrassing bulge. Personally I'm convinced that we will one day witness a thrower who gets their physics all wrong and leaves the ball-and-chain in the circle while they fly out to the 80 metres mark.

Race walking was another prime prospect for ejection in the view of some others present, an event regularly punctuated with distressing technical dismissals and which, in one observer's memorable phrase, resembles shouting in a whisper.

It seemed to me that Johnson ought at least to have been grateful that no red-card-waving officials presided over his events, as he would have been routinely disqualified for not lifting – his knees, that is. "They were always moving too fast to be seen,'' he responded.

When the topic of long jumping came up, Johnson observed laconically that it always seemed to be the longest jumps which were ruled as fouls. It is certainly true that long jumping, and its sister event triple-jumping, offer unrivalled opportunities for angling-style stories of "the one that got away".

One thinks of Carl Lewis' huge foul at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, where he lost his mighty match against fellow American Mike Powell. One thinks, too, of the tiny fraction of toe which disqualified what would otherwise have been a winning effort for Britain's Jonathan Edwards in the 1996 Olympic triple jump final. A couple of millimetres meant he had to wait another four years to claim what was rightly his.

By drawing a line before the sand, as it were, athletics officials offer a minority within their sport an outstanding opportunity for fate-rueing open to no other sector of their community. Remember that long and triple jump fouls are not measured, which means their possibilities are boundless. Okay, you may hear the odd fast-finishing sprinter maintaining that if their race had only been five metres longer they would have won, or 1,500m runner claiming that if they hadn't run the first lap so slowly they would have broken the world record, but in terms of being rich fields of excuses these hardly compare.

In this respect long-jumping currently resembles football before the age of Andy Gray and Sky TV, when it was possible to speculate that shots had been taken from 30 yards without being immediately contradicted by screen wizardry indicating the effort had travelled 27.5 yards at a speed of 78.527mph.

For Thompson, sitting at the opposite end of the room to Johnson, this discussion topic was one he could not resist commenting on. "If you lose the board, you lose the discipline,'' he said. Coming from a man whose long-jump technique earned huge quantities of decathlon points over the years, this observation rendered the take-off-where-you-like school of thought facile. It is an integral part of jumping to perform within a framework. Doing away with the take-off board would be akin to widening the goals in football – an act of dilution.

Before he left, Johnson affably but firmly ruled out the notion that he had ambitions to become a future president of the International Association of Athletics Federations. "Just as well,'' someone remarked. The American took it in good grace.